


God Won't Let Me

by monsterfuckerdean (MushroomDoggo)



Series: Supernatural Collage Challenge [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Case Fic, Challenge Response, Gen, Gore, HBO SPN, Horror, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:14:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26175562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MushroomDoggo/pseuds/monsterfuckerdean
Summary: She was in the back seat, now.She had been on the side of the road, and now she was in my fucking back seat.I couldn’t see her. But I knew.
Series: Supernatural Collage Challenge [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1900870
Comments: 8
Kudos: 31
Collections: HBO Supernatural





	God Won't Let Me

She was in the back seat, now.

She had been on the side of the road, and now she was in my fucking back seat.

I couldn’t see her. But I knew.

I could smell her, I think. She smelled like those salt-packed fish old dudes keep in their sheds. Or maybe she just smelled like low tide, and I was imagining the old man part. Maybe she smelled like an old body washed up from the ocean.

Maybe she  _ was _ an old body washed up from the ocean.

I gripped the wheel a little tighter. My fingers found those comforting grooves, a little too big for me (was anyone really big enough to fill them?) and yet they somehow felt like just the right size. 

It was gonna be fine.

She was probably a ghost or something, and she’d go away as soon as I got far enough away from… whatever it was she was attached to.

Just a ghost. You're not scared of ghosts. That's like an exterminator being scared of a roach.

You’re a professional, Dean.

Time to fucking act like it.

There was a spare shotgun under the passenger seat. I could grab that if I really needed it. But this was one of those ‘more afraid of you than you are of them’ deals. Like a snake or something. 

God, did she smell…

It’s cool. It’s late night on back roads, what did you expect? Just turn up the radio.

I reached over--slow enough not to scare, but fast enough not to seem suspicious--and cranked the music up a few ticks louder. 

The bass was starting to shake the framework of the car, now. Just enough of a rattle to keep my hands from shaking. Or to hide them from shaking, I guess.

And then she sighed.

I set my jaw.

It was a long, low, disgusting sound. Like a hissing gator. Her breath filled the car with a smell so strong I wanted to puke.

“Are…”

White knuckles. White knuckles in a fucking second.

“Are you…” She sighed again, this one shorter, then drew in an equally phlegm-y and wheezing breath. “Are you going to… Heaven?”

Man,  _ fuck _ this.

“Uh…” I coughed. It smelled so fucking bad in here, I could hardly breathe. “Nah. Cali.”

The air inside the car was growing thicker now. Like a swamp. Like a fucking jungle. I don’t think it was even one degree warmer, but I could feel myself starting to sweat like a pig. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I was running through the list of things I had seen ghosts do. This wasn’t one of them.

Colder, maybe. Hotter… never.

“No.”

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck

“Are  _ you _ ?”

I heard her move.

It was almost a worse sound than the breathing. Almost. Somehow it was equal parts dry and wet… like her bones were brittle as twigs, but her skin was soaked and bloated and squealing against the leather seats. The sound it made as it peeled off, turning to powder as it went… 

Her face was in the rearview mirror, now.

If you could call it one.

At the side of the road, under the light of a single, flickering street lamp, she had looked human. Only barely. But human.

Now, in here, I could see the way her eyes had deflated inside her skull. The way her jaw had disintegrated, hanging open like Marley’s ghost. Her scalp was a wasteland of skull and skin and bloodied clumps of hair. I could see that the rattling sound when she breathed was a result of a rotted hole in her neck, skin fluttering about her windpipe like a dying hornet.

One flayed hand gripped the front seat. She dug her fingers into the fabric and hauled herself upright, putrid water leaking out of her bloated muscles. Or maybe blood. Or maybe both.

The liquid dripped down the seat and pooled beside me. It began to run along a crack in the upholstery and soaked into the leg of my jeans.

“I’m not going to heaven,” I said, breathing shallowly. “You have to get out.”

She breathed in. The skin sucked over her windpipe, and she choked on it. She hacked up a lungful of water to clear the blockage. It dribbled down the seat, as well.

“I’m not going, either,” she said. Her jaw made a sound like a rock tumbler as she spoke. “God won’t let me.”

There was a lot of water.

I was starting to realize that.

There was a  _ lot _ of fucking water.

Not just what was leaking out of her and rolling down the car seat. Not just what was bubbling up and out of her throat. 

There was water on the floor, too.

It sloshed a bit, splashed up and over the side of my boot.

How much water could I have in here before the car stopped?

Fuck. Fuck.

Getting hard to breathe, now.

Not just because of the smell. Though the smell didn’t help.

No. It was so thick in here, the air so humid and heavy and thick as fucking  _ soup _ , that I couldn’t even get it down my throat. It was like breathing in a balloon. Like choking on tar.

Like drowning.

I’m fucking drowning.

I didn’t have one more second. I just whipped the wheel to one side and careened off the road. Don’t even know what side of the road.

My hands clawed through the water--water the car was filled with water dirty green and brown water fukcing  _ water _ \--and found the door handle.

I had to put my shoulder into it, but the door opened.

Gallons of water spilled out in a massive wave.

I rolled out of the car and onto the grass, shoved out by the force of the sewer water.

That’s what it was. No doubt. Tasted like rancid piss as I hacked it up into the grass-- a good pint or two, added to the gallons from the car.

Mud and sewer water and vomit and fuck knows what else. But I dug my fingers into it, gripping the grass with everything I had, steadying myself before standing. On my hands and knees in piss and shit and vomit.

The good news was I couldn’t really smell it anymore.

The night air was cold. It blew right through me, and my clammy skin went ice cold in seconds.

But my lungs worked now.

I could get a breath in, even as I shivered in the cold. Felt like I’d been frostbitten on the inside, but at least I could breathe.

My warm breath puffed out like a smokestack. If the ghost was still here, I’d have no way of knowing. Not until it was too late.

I spit once more into the mud and tried to get to my feet.

My boots slipped in the slop at my feet. I tried not to think about why it felt chunky.

I wiped my hands on my jeans.

Normally, I would have gotten back in the car and just kept driving. I say ‘normally’ because it’s not altogether uncommon for a hunter to happen upon some weird fucking shit on the backroads of America. Especially when they were alone.

I mean, honestly. Everyone’s seen some fucked up shit on backroads, hunter or not.

And everyone just keeps driving.

What else is there to do?

Who do you call about a ghost drowning you in your car? The thought of dialing up 911 and describing the experience I’d just had was almost funny enough to laugh.

If I did, though, I’d just puke again. So I held it down.

Like I was saying.

Normally, I’d get right back on the road.

But there was a hole.

There weren’t usually holes.

Fuck.

I took an uneasy step forward, closer to the hole.

It was a perfectly round hole, about the size of a manhole cover. It went perfectly straight down into the ground. It had a perfectly nice white ladder on its inside surface. In other words, it was man-fucking-made-- an access to a sewer system that couldn’t have existed.

It couldn’t have existed because there wasn’t cell reception out here.

I was a good forty minutes at ticketable speeds from civilization. In any direction. 

I mean, maybe there was a cabin out here.

But cabins off the highway didn’t usually have flushing toilets.

I took another step closer to the hole.

My boot crunched.

She howled. It was like the growling, yelping of a rabid dog.

My boot was in her ribcage.

And she ran--or, she crawled--out from under my feet. Propelled by two dissolving legs and the barely-there stumps of arms. Parts of her flesh pulled off her body as easily as snow sliding off a roof. She screamed into the sewer mud.

She moved like fuckin’ bacteria.

Her toes dug into the dirt and she flew forward, headfirst into the hole.

Howling all the way.

Her body thudded off one side of the hole--a scraping sound, bone on concrete for sure--and then the other.

I tried not to think about what parts of her I had under my nails. But I could feel how packed with muck and grime and viscera they were.

You could say it was a scene right out of a horror movie, but that would be underselling it. 

First off, you can't feel horror movies. You watch them from the safety of your couch or even the moderate discomfort of a sticky theatre seat. But I could fucking feel this.

Second, horror movies don't have the silences. That's something they get wrong basically every time; they don't show the way you breathe and vomit and claw at the ground. They play you a soundtrack and let you look at the monster in all its plasticine glory.

They don't show the choice.

Maybe that's because most people  _ wouldn _ ' _ t  _ follow an armless corpse into an impossible sewer. I guess I don't have any way of knowing.

What I did know, though, was that most people driving down this road would not survive what I had just survived.

And I was a professional.

The trunk of the Impala made a familiar metallic creak as I threw it open. The inside was dry. I guess she had been conserving her resources.

I took a sawed-off and jammed it down the back waistband of my jeans. Thought for a sec, then added a flashlight. As much as it felt like I genuinely had two sticks up my ass, I didn't exactly have another option… I needed both hands to climb down, after all.

I was hedging all my bets on this thing being a ghost. If I got stuck down there with something that could take a salt round to the skull, I was basically fucked. Certainly wouldn't be seeing my brother again anytime soon. Let alone my dad.

I closed the trunk.

The more my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the more I could see the horror which had spilled out of the car. Swaths of skin with flesh still clinging to it, all of it a dirty grey-brown and pocked with a web of rotting holes.

I tried not to think about the state of the Impala as I lowered myself into the hole.

Wet boots weren't made for climbing ladders. That's for sure.

It took all my concentration to keep from slipping off. And then an extra ten percent to not think about what the thick, phlegm-y shit I was rubbing my hands on.

And so I thought about her story.

I tried to think of it like an upside, right? Like, I don't always have the chance to think about what's making the ghosts tick, y'know? I have to figure it all out in a blur of adrenaline and smoke and gunfire.

_ Are you going to heaven? _

What a stupid fucking question. Of course I'm not going to heaven, I'm driving a fucking car.

Okay. Break it down, Dean.

Maybe she didn't mean  _ heaven _ heaven. Maybe she meant… Disneyland?

That's even stupider.

Maybe…

Maybe there was a real town around here named Heaven. And she was just trying to get there.

That was possible. Likely, even.

And I mean I didn't have town names memorized or anything, so it's not like I would've known right off the bat if that were true.

Towns around here are called, like… Picklefuck Pastures. Or Boring.

Anything's possible. 

Yeah. Anything's possible, but not everything is right. I had a gut feeling that that wasn't what she meant.

It was dark, now. Darker than my eyes could adjust to.

That struck me as being not possible.

But I kept slinking down. I could feel the change in texture as the slime wore off my boots, and the ladder changed to a rusty, flaky surface. I tried not to drive the chips of paint into my hands, but I certainly bled a bit.

_ Are you going to heaven? _

It sure would be nice. Eventually. Then again, anything must seem like heaven next to this tube filled with aging bodily fluids.

At long last, my feet found the bottom, and I stepped down from the ladder.

I pulled the flashlight and the sawed-off out of my pants (a relief in and of itself) and did my best to survey my surroundings.

It was your average sewer. Of course, the idea of finding your average sewer in a place where you should never find a sewer was disturbing on its own. Like finding a phone booth in Antarctica.

The ladder had put me down on a thin strip of concrete--not any bigger than an above-ground sidewalk--alongside a river of filth. The river itself was still, or very nearly.

Against my better judgement, I squatted down and put my finger in the water.

It only came up to my first knuckle. It was much thicker than water should be, but it was flowing. Oozing, I guess.

Well, if whoever this was had been dumped in a sewer, her body would follow the flow. It was the only lead I had right now… and there certainly wasn't as body in the water as far as I could see.

So I started to walk.

The scuffing sounds from my boots echoed strangely against the cavernous concrete walls.

_ Are you going to heaven? _

Let's be honest, honey: none of us are.

If a heaven existed, filled with all those chubby angels and harps and clouds and shit, why was I walking through an impossible sewer? Why could I smell the degraded fat of a dead person packed under my fingernails? Why had I voided my last meal by the side of the road, covered in greywater?

I'm sure the Bible has an answer, but I never was keen on that cinderblock of lies. 

_ Are you going to heaven? _

Well, if I am, I'm an edge case at best.

Being honest again, I'm not the most tolerable person. I generally do things that could be considered 'good', I guess, but my good deeds seem to have more than a few casualties. Plus, if we're bringing motivations into it… well, who knows. Maybe all my early ones don't count because I was only doing what my dad told me to do.

That might make this my first ever point in the heaven column, if that's how we play it. First time out from under daddy's watchful eye, first time doing something good of my own accord.

God, that sucked.

_ Are you going to heaven? _

If I am, then what's the point of sticking around?

If I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I'd be kickin' it in a mansion in the afterlife, my every carnal need met, why not just use the great cosmic cheat code and skip to that? If I knew for sure that I was, why not just shoot myself in the brain right now?

_ ARE YOU GOING TO HEAVEN? _

I stopped short.

I swept my flashlight back and forth, hoping that the vision might disappear. But when the light landed on it again, there it was: a sign.

The kind of sign they put outside high schools, with the sports schedules and the fall musical dates and the parent-teacher conference in swappable letters.

It was laying in the water.

Okay, not laying, exactly. More wedged. Like some sort of makeshift dam.

The sign had a scudge line maybe a good foot higher than the water currently resided. Under the line was a few more words, in much smaller plastic letters:

_ 2 questions reveal the answer _

I guess it hit me then that I'd totally and completely misunderstood her.

She hadn't been asking if I was going  _ right then _ . And she hadn't been asking if I was going eventually.

I mean, I guess she kind of was.

Whatever.

It was one of those stupid ads. The kind of thing you see on the back roads of excessively religious areas; come pay us, we'll tell you if the big guy's letting you in. Better yet, if he isn't, we'll get you in!

So now the story had changed.

She was a con artist, preying on people with a weight on their conscience.

I tried not to take that to heart.

I kept walking.

_ Are you going to heaven? _

I'd said no.

_ Me, neither. God won't let me. _

I mean, that made enough sense. Who has a greater weight on their conscience than the piece of shit trying to turn faith and fear into money?

There were still missing pieces, though. I knew enough about this stuff to know I was missing the keystone.

But it was airless in the sewer, and I could hardly think with this little oxygen.

Honestly, that was the worst part. I could take the smell, and the darkness, and the humidity… if only the air down here was moving. And not so enclosed.

It reminded me of all the things I hated about airplanes.

Being stuck in some box, breathing other people's air. Unsure where you were, really.

Plane crash. Tunnel collapse. It all ends up in the same place, right?

Focus, Dean.

I could feel my palms starting to sweat. If there was one thing I was good at, it was psyching myself out.

I tried to grip my gun a little more confidently, but it made my hands shake.

The beam of the flashlight bounced from wall to wall as I adjusted my grip. It caught a little smear of red somewhere… and I paused to track it.

Blood, I thought. Had to be blood. It's always blood.

This time it wasn't, though. It was spray paint.

Spray paint graffiti on the wall of an impossible sewer. There was just something so bad-horror-movie about that set-up.

I traced each letter with the beam of my flashlight. It said:

_ the healing hand held back _

Just like that, in hasty little letters. It wasn't the kind of graffiti meant to look artistic, or even especially good. It was specifically meant to communicate a message, and that's it.

So… held back from what?

And then I heard it again, twice as haunting as it echoed through the damp sewer: her anguished howling. Like a tortured cat.

I cocked my gun and picked up the pace. She was close.

Alright, so she was a con artist. She got money and attention from the overly-faithful. Tale as old as fuckin' time.

Not that I didn't like the idea of wasting an ass like that, but I still felt a little… I dunno. Hesitant.

The healing hand… a faith healer?

She screamed again, a wet and strangled sound.

My boot slipped on the concrete as I broke into a run.

Faith healers didn't exist, though. There wasn't a way to just fix people with prayer. There really weren't answers in witchcraft, either; there were laws preventing that. Eye for an eye. Can't heal one without hurting another.

Not that there weren't people more than willing to do that shit.

Okay. Something up ahead.

I couldn't tell what just yet. But I sensed something dangerous.

The sounds changed. Warped a bit. The scuffs of my boots came back to me slower, and doubled over themselves. The air felt… well, not fresher, really. But it moved more.

The sewer opened up into a dome. I dunno what you'd call it-- I'm sure there's a professional term for it, I just dunno what it is. At the very top of the dome was a chute. I'm guessing it led to the surface.

It took me a second to gather the courage, but I lifted my flashlight.

Around the edge of the dome, leaned up against the wall, were more than two dozen bodies. None of them had been killed in the same way, though.

There was no pattern of puncture wounds on throats, or cracked-open ribcages, or burns in strategic shapes. Nothing that you could assign to a monster, or really even a serial killer.

It looked like disease. Like cancers and rashes and degenerative disorders. Like birth defects and mutations. Another thing I didn't know near enough about. It was all just a guess.

In the center of the room, barely upright, was the woman from the car.

Her chest was heaving, but it sounded less like breathing and more like a garbage bag caught in an industrial fan. The loss of major organs, limbs, and bones seemed to have thrown her off-kilter-- she had no arms to help her balance, one of her legs had been stripped of most skin and muscle, and something hung out of her shredded torso near her hip, throbbing slowly and arrhythmically. She stumbled even standing still, desperately trying to remain standing.

I lifted my gun.

She looked at me. I didn't think it was possible.

"Are you…" 

"Yeah," I said. "And I don't need your help."

I fired.

I hadn't seen a ghost do this before. But I guess there's a first time for everything.

A ghost possessing its own body. Hanging on through anything. Somehow managing to keep its body alive through sheer force of will.

The shell exploded against her chest, and the barest whisper of a ghost flew backwards. The body fell like a crash-test dummy. 

I stood there a moment longer, still aimed at the body on the ground, waiting for her to take another shot.

To my surprise, that was all it took.

So now I was here. Two dozen rotting bodies… plus a new one.

I cracked open a shotgun shell and began to sprinkle the body with salt. Felt like there wasn't near enough left to burn, but I'd be damned if I didn't do it anyway.

It was deathly quiet for a minute or two.

Then, a strange feeling overtook me.

I stood up straight and cleared my throat, surveying the rotting corpses around me.

"Uh…" I clenched and unclenched one fist. "So, what, uh… what happened to you guys, anyway?"

Silence.

I guess it was stupid to think that--

"She promised…"

I whirled around, and locked eyes with a body behind me. It stared back at me in a way that was too glassy to be alive, but too pained to be dead.

"What?" I asked. "She promised you what?"

"Heaven," another voice rasped.

This one to my right. I took two uneasy steps towards this next slumping form.

"If we…" it continued, tongue lolling out against its chin,"trust in…"

The tongue, having not tried to move in who-knows-how long, detached itself from the inside of the body's mouth. It dropped unceremoniously into the creature's lap.

I pressed the back of my wrist against my nose. Somehow, watching a tongue fall off of a still-living body brought the smell back full-force.

"God?" I asked, softly and into the sleeve of my jacket.

"It didn't work." This voice back over to my left.

I shined my flashlight in its direction. This body was frighteningly, disturbingly, damningly new. The skin was barely greying, the eyes still able to see.

"We died," they said, smacking their dry lips experimentally. "And she dumped us here. To protect the lie."

My grip on the flashlight faltered. Its light wavered. "She killed you…"

"God killed us." This voice accompanied by the creaking of some very old joints. "She helped."

Impossible sewer.

Tomb and crime scene.

A dozen ghosts, whose only crime was faith and fear.

I didn't tell them how she'd lied. How there was no such thing as heaven, and I should know. I didn't even apologise, really, which I guess was a shitty fucking thing to do. I'm sure none of these people had the eulogy they deserved. Or the burial, clearly.

What I did say was "I can get you folks to heaven."

I set the whole place ablaze. Burned twenty-seven bodies that night: twenty-six victims, and one murderer.

They didn't make a sound as they burned.

It was better that way. This was business, after all. And I was a professional.

When I got back to the car, nothing was left but a kind of distant smell. The hole to the impossible sewer crumbled in on itself, the remains of a murderer sucked down into it like a drain.

While I drove, I thought about the water.

It made sense now. At some point, someone had caught her, probably torn her arms off or broken them or something and chucked her down with all her victims. She'd probably drowned face-down in other people's piss and shit, which was honestly a mild fate for someone like her.

But I try not to pass judgement.

I'm a professional.

I don't need all the answers on how the roaches get in. It's my job to get them out.

That's twenty-seven less violent spirits in the world.

But I figured I'd keep that tally to myself.


End file.
